Android 4.0 Coming To Raspberry Pi Hobby Computer

Posted by michaels| Thu, Aug 02, 2012 - 5:30 PM

Since the tiny ARM-based Raspberry Pi hobby computer was launched a few months ago, it’s popularity has taken off enormously. So much so, that there’s now a port of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) coming its way from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, for which they have posted a progress update, “Naren has been working on a port of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) to Raspberry Pi, and as you can see from the screenshots and video below, he’s been making great progress. Hardware-accelerated graphics and video have been up and running smoothly for some time; AudioFlinger support is the only major missing piece at the moment.”

They hope to release the source code once the two separate code lines have been merged, “This implementation uses a different kernel and VideoCore binary image from the one available on GitHub, which is why we’ve been keeping quiet about it so far. We’re investigating the feasibility of converging the two code lines to produce a single common platform as soon as we can, at which point we hope to release the sources for you to play with.” Finally, the video above shows the development code in action. Note that it doesn’t run as smoothly as on a real smartphone, because of the low 700MHz clock speed, single core CPU and 256MB RAM, but it’s great for an enthusiast demo.

Update: those of you looking to play with Android on Pi in advance of our source code release might want to check out the community Razdroid project, which last month produced its first non-accelerated port of Gingerbread on top of the publicly released VideoCore binary.